Born in the eye of the FBI

It is 50 years since Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were executed as spies. Their son Robert was just one of the 'red diaper' babies - children of communists, targets of McCarthy. Gary Younge tracks them down

On the evening of June 19 1953, Robert Meeropol was sent out to play while his parents were being executed. He was six years' old, and while he had only a vague idea of what was happening, he knew that whatever was going on did not bode well for his future. "We were watching a ball game at a friend's house when this newsflash crawled across the bottom of the screen," says Meeropol, "but I didn't know what it said." His brother Michael, however, who was 10, knew only too well what it meant and what was about to happen: "That's it, goodbye, goodbye," he said.

With the whole drama unfolding on the cusp of his infant consciousness, Robert's experience was more impressionistic. "I didn't know what was going on, but I must have sensed the essence of Michael's reaction," says Meeropol, now 56, who was adopted by Abel and Anne Meeropol, friends of his parents, after the execution. "The only way to get away from it was to be sent outside to play ball. It was never difficult to get me to go outside and play ball, or to get adults to distract me, because I wanted to be distracted. I wanted to get away from whatever was causing the trouble. When it got too dark, they called us in. They sent me to bed and I went to sleep. I wanted to avoid the situation."

What was baffling for a young child was all too clear for much of the adult world. Robert's parents, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, were sentenced to death after they were found guilty of conspiring to pass secrets on the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union. They were communists in postwar America - a time and a place where such a political affiliation could lose you your liberty, livelihood and, in the Rosenbergs' case, your life.

By the early 1950s, Senator Joseph McCarthy's crusade was in full swing. Communism, he argued, represented "a great conspiracy, on a scale so immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any previous venture in the history of men". In 1950, the McCarran Act - also known as the Internal Security Act - was passed, forcing communist organisations to register with the federal government. Meanwhile, some of America's most prominent writers and performers, including Arthur Miller, Orson Welles, Langston Hughes, Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett (not to mention hundreds of others), were called before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Those who appeared were ordered to explain and often renounce their views, and to name other communists or risk being blacklisted.

Fifty years on, the Rosenbergs' trial and execution remains the most potent emblem of this gruesome period in US history. Jean-Paul Sartre described the execution as "a legal lynching that has covered a whole nation in blood". "When two innocents are sentenced to death, it is the whole world's business," he added.

And the world duly made the Rosenbergs their business. Before their execution, American embassies across the globe were flooded with petitions and letters; one protester was killed in the crush at a "Liberez les Rosenbergs" rally in the Place de la Concorde, Paris. The liberal consensus at the time was that they were both completely innocent. Investigations and revelations since the end of the cold war have revealed that Julius Rosenberg probably did pass secrets to the Soviet Union, although nothing remotely as serious as those relating to the atomic bomb. Meanwhile, Ethel was almost certainly innocent - sentenced to death on the accusation that she typed the spying notes, but in truth because she refused to testify against her husband.

Her brother, David Greenglass, whose testimony played a major role in sending her to the chair, has since admitted that he lied. He said that he gave false testimony because he feared that his own wife might be charged, and that he was encouraged by the prosecution to lie. "I don't know who typed it, frankly, and to this day I can't remember that the typing took place," said Greenglass, who was sentenced to 15 years and released from prison in 1960 for his part in the so-called "spy ring".

If the Rosenbergs' deaths were symbolic of America's political intolerance, the fate of Robert Meeropol, and that of his older brother, illustrated the precariousness of the lives of children whose parents were members of the Communist party. Most were too politically immature to grasp fully either the stance or the risks their parents were taking as a result of their political convictions. But most, even at Meeropol's tender age, were emotionally aware enough to comprehend that the fabric that bound together their families was under constant threat. And in an era where everything their parents touched turned to red, they, too, found themselves the objects of state scrutiny and political vilification.

"Ethel and Julius were at the very centre of my terror," said the late Miriam Zahler, whose mother was a Communist party member and shop steward in Michigan. "What I knew was that they were innocent, they were facing death and they had two children. I wondered who was taking care of Michael and Robby." When Zahler asked her mother why the Rosenbergs were imprisoned, she told her daughter it was for passing out leaflets. "I concluded that if the Rosenbergs were in jail because they passed out leaflets, my mother, who also passed out leaflets, might be arrested, too."

Ros Baxandall's father had worked for the communist international movement, the Comintern, at its headquarters in Vienna between 1932 and 1936. She was 13 when the Rosenbergs were executed, and took the day off school to protest against the execution in New York's Union Square. "Obviously, I didn't think they should be executed, but I thought they were guilty because my parents would have done the same thing. They really did think the Soviet Union was wonderful."

They called them "red diaper babies": children raised in the American Communist party.

The term red diaper baby was originally an insult, aimed at the Communist party's internal aristocracy, which ensured that those with parents in the party would find themselves promoted rapidly through the party ranks during the 1920s. But during the mid-1960s, the phrase was reclaimed after the rightwing John Birch Society published the names of red diaper babies at the Berkeley campus. It was supposed to stigmatise them, but ended up having the opposite effect. "The effort at intimidation backfired," wrote Judy Kaplan and Linn Shapiro in their book, Red Diapers, Growing Up In The Communist Left. "Students found each other through the list, which helped their organising efforts immeasurably."

Although not all red diaper babies would grow up to be as radical as their parents, most have found that their particular experience as children during that peculiar time in politics has left them with a shared heritage. "Every story is complicated by the fact that it is both a story about a left culture and completely personal," says Linda Gordon, 63, whose father was a trade unionist and party member. "While we all do have that common experience, everything is filtered through individual personalities."

Gordon says that the experience made her "a fearful person"; Baxandall says that it gave her "an ambivalent attitude toward fear". Like Meeropol, both Gordon and Baxandall's parents were Jewish; Gordon grew up observing most Jewish rituals, while Baxandall's parents were hostile to religion. Whatever their differences, Gordon, now a history professor at New York University, concludes, "No matter what your politics or personality, I think all red diaper babies have in common this notion that people have the power to make things happen and people have a responsibility to make things happen." She and Baxandall were both active in the women's movement. They first met at a Black Panther demonstration in Connecticut.

Nina Hartley, the daughter and granddaughter of communists, and one of America's best known porn stars, describes herself as a "third-generation feminist" and a secular Jew. While her parents, it's said, eventually became Zen Buddhist priests, she has been a vocal advocate of the empowering force of sex and an avowed leftist. "I'm proud of my heritage's intellectual history and its empathy with the persecuted," she has said. "Politically, I'm leftwing. I want everyone to have a job, everyone to have food, clothing, shelter and education. Utopia might be communist but in the meantime we have to have socialism."

Another red diaper baby, Carl Bernstein - the Washington Post reporter who along with Bob Woodward broke the Watergate scandal - rebelled against his father's atheism as a child. He describes in his memoir how he insisted on being bar mitzvahed. "You don't want me to be Jewish," he recalls telling his parents. "This has to do with your politics. And it's not right. And you don't really believe in freedom. It's communism... " When eventually he got his way, the FBI were across the street taking down car licence numbers during the Bar Mitzvah ceremony. Subsequently, the family hastily left their home near Washington DC for a week, while subpoenas were being handed out for a hearing of the House Committee on Un-American Activities to investigate the Rosenberg Defence Committee.

Paradoxically, some of the red diaper babies went through much of their lives unaware precisely what their parents' political allegiance actually was. Ros Baxandall, chair of American studies at the state university of New York, didn't find out that her father was in the party until he was on his death bed. "During our adolescence, no one mentioned the word 'communism', " she says. "We didn't realise until the 1960s that our dad had been in the party. Our mother still denies knowing that her husband was a red."

Gordon says she cannot remember being told, but seemed to have always known, from right back when her grandfather would argue politics with her father in Yiddish. This was partly a sign of the times. Their parents may have been communists, but they none the less lived in an era when children were supposed to be seen and not heard, let alone talked to. "They had so many problems of their own they didn't know what to do," says Baxandall. "They were of a different generation, which generally didn't believe in being straight with kids."

This combination of being politically subversive and domestically conventional could have devastating effects on children. Gordon remembers a time when a woman she had never seen before turned up at her house. "This woman appeared in my bedroom. I didn't really register who she was at first, but I gradually realised that the police were after her, and that really underlay my anxiety about the police coming to get my parents, and then, one day, she was gone. That had a terrible effect on me."

Their parents' politics also had some specific influences on how they were raised. "They were very weird about certain things," recalls Baxandall. "The only time I was really hit was when I told on my sister and my father called me a stool pigeon and a rat. So they had these overreactions to things that others didn't."

But their parents' failure to inform them of what they were doing also revealed a culture of fear that had engulfed the party at that time. Panicked by McCarthyism, the Communist party leadership believed America was on the verge of fascism during the early 1950s and ordered many of its members into hiding. By the early 1950s, around a third of its active membership was underground or abroad. "Party offices were closed down, mass work cut back and membership consciously allowed to drop off," recalls Harry Haywood in his book, Black Bolshevik. When he went to ask what he could do to help the party, he was told, "Aw, just go out and lose yourself."

This cautiousness would remain with their parents for most of their lives. "I never heard Anne say, 'When we were in the party,'" says Meeropol, who now runs the Rosenberg Fund for Children, a charity that assists children of progressive activists. "But as Abel got older, he did - and when he did he always dropped his voice to a whisper." Anne and Abel (who wrote the words of Strange Fruit, the song made famous by Billie Holiday) left the party around the time they adopted Robert and Michael. Robert believes they did so because the courts might have frowned upon communists adopting the boys.

In such an atmosphere, to tell your children that you were an active member of the party was to make both yourself and them vulnerable. What they did not know, they could neither divulge inadvertently nor have beaten out of them by the police. "My parents wouldn't explain things," says Gordon. "Partly they just didn't, and partly they thought they were protecting me by not explaining."

The FBI kept red diaper babies, as well as their parents, under close surveillance, often stalking them when they knew their parents would not be around. "My parents said to ignore them and not to talk to them," says Baxandall. "But I used to throw Tampax at them when they would be there sitting outside our house."

When the FBI finally released some of its files under the Freedom of Information Act, many red diaper babies would find reports going back into their childhood. "Mine goes way back to a letter I wrote to the school newspaper about some lynching in the south," says Baxandall. "I had no recollection that I wrote this letter, but it was in my file. They spent a lot of time documenting things that were very easy to document. I had a very old Volkswagen car that I sold. They had a record of this. They would document the movies I went to. But, later on, I swam in front of the nuclear submarines in a protest and they didn't have anything like that in my file. Nothing meaningful or political." Parents were not necessarily as keen as their children to see what the state had on them. "I wanted him [her father] to send for his file and he wouldn't," says Gordon."I don't want to go into that," he told her.

Making sense of this world - in which your family was constantly threatened although you did not know precisely why, or by whom - made for a disorienting childhood. "I knew they were different," says Baxandall. "I knew they read different publications. They had African-American friends, there were always people staying at our house who were hiding. I was given children's books that no one else was given. But they had so many secrets. Once, I must have been about six, I said to my parents, 'How come all your friends are in jail or divorced?' My dad said: 'We're proud of those in jail.'"

Only in retrospect did it become apparent to her that others realised they were different, too. "It turns out that my friends knew my parents were very left," says Baxandall. "He would quarrel with every textbook I ever had. I'd bring these things up about the French revolution and my teacher would say, 'Let's have your father come, rather than you quoting your father.' I remember a friend of mine saying, 'Don't your parents ever talk about money?' Even though I tried to fit in, I was still more political than most people. In my high school yearbook, it says I would most likely marry 'Eric the Red'." The overall effect on many red diaper babies was to leave them feeling embattled and alien from America as a whole.

"A dark cloud of generalised anxiety hovered at the edge of my consciousness," writes Meeropol of his childhood in his recent book, An Execution In The Family. "A sense that something about my family was terribly wrong and that my circumstances might get even worse. Most of the time, when I ignored or forgot about the upheavals of my life, I felt reasonably safe. But 'we' (whoever that was) were under attack from whatever was out there and I wanted to keep a low profile, beneath the notice of my enemies."

While the "enemies" presented themselves clearly enough, identifying quite who the "we" constituted was more subtle - particularly with so little help from their parents. "One way of identifying people was through the music," says Meeropol. "If people were into folk music, like, say, Pete Seeger, that might be a sign they were on the left. I would ask kids on the street what paper their parents read. There was a tendency for communist children not to be interested in consumption quite as much and not to wear such fancy clothes."

So, if their parents' membership of the Communist party left them with one foot outside the broader American society, it gave them one foot in another, smaller but tighter knit, leftwing culture. This was particularly true of New York, where 40% of the party members lived at one time. "There were some neighbourhoods in New York where the Communist party was quite strong enough that there were many kids, and it was not by any means always deviant," says Gordon.

Baxandall recalls, "Every weekend we'd go to visit people and we'd have these brunches. My parents and their friends would talk and the children would all go off, and I knew these children were much more like me. They came from similar situations. There was such a feeling of community that took away that sense of alienation. I mourn that loss, rather than any vision my parents might have had."

For Meeropol, attending leftwing summer camps was the only time he felt truly comfortable. "Then you were all of a sudden in a majority. That played a very important role, because we could talk about all of this stuff and we could be friends with them and we didn't have to keep secrets - or at least as many secrets. I could see what it would be like to be functional in that community, rather than always be outside of the community."

But, for most of the time, when they were not in this secluded environment, the sense of political isolation could have serious psychological effects. These were most pronounced with Meeropol, who not only lost his parents but was also anxious to preserve some sense of anonymity after he changed his name to Meeropol. For much of his childhood and youth, he feared being outed and having to relive his parents' ordeal. "I passed throughout high school, disguised as a mild-mannered liberal," he said, referring to the way in which some very light-skinned African-Americans would "pass" for white during the segregation era and beyond. "That's exactly what I did. When I went to the law firm, I passed. When I wanted to do an urban anthropology project and joined a business organisation and cut my hair, I passed. I seemed to have this fascination for passing."

But passing took a toll on his personal life, and his inability to open up almost prematurely ended his relationship with Elli, while he was at university; she would later become his wife. "There was this core of who I was that I couldn't talk to anybody about, so I wanted to keep things on a superficial level, because if they started going in a direction that was more intimate and more personal, they might get somewhere I couldn't go. It wasn't conscious. I just couldn't go there."

While Meeropol's experience was acute, it was by no means unique. "Lots of people in the women's movement were red diaper babies, but we never said anything to each other about it," says Baxandall. "We didn't know that we had that in common until later. There's a terrific self-censorship."

The American Communist party emerged from a split in the American socialist party shortly after the Russian revolution in 1919, and dutifully tied its programme and policies to those of the Soviet Union. Its membership, like much of the American working class at the time, was drawn from those who were born abroad. While it was never very large, for a brief moment during the Depression of the 1930s the party was fairly influential.

"At a time of widespread hopelessness and despair, the party's cadres were doing something," writes Ellen Schrecker, a historian of the McCarthy era. "They mobilised unemployed workers and marched them to local city halls to demand relief. They organised neighbourhood groups to prevent homelessness by carrying the furniture of evicted tenants back into their apartments . . . They saved nine black teenagers, from Scottsboro, Alabama, from execution on trumped-up charges. Communists, it seemed, were everywhere... or at least in most of the big struggles of the early 1930s."

Between 1936 and 1938, the party doubled its membership, to just over 80,000, while the Sunday edition of its newspaper, Daily Worker, had a circulation of 100,000. The party and its members would feature in great works of American literature such as Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, and Native Son by Richard Wright, who was a member. "As long as we did not make too much noise about it," said Earl Browder, the party's leader during the 1930s, "we became almost respectable. Never quite respectable. Almost."

But as war broke out in Europe, the party's numbers started to dwindle. The Soviet Union's ambivalent attitude towards Nazism - first opposing it, then accommodating it, finally doing battle with it - forced zigzags on the party line that lost supporters worldwide. With the end of the war, America's political class defined the Soviet Union and all of those who supported it as its principal enemy and started the witch-hunts that would later make the McCarthyite era so notorious. When Soviet premier Khrushchev denounced Stalin's crimes in 1956, the American party became a rump.

Those raised in the party during the postwar period would reach adulthood in an entirely different political era. With Vietnam, black power, feminism and the rise of identity politics, the agenda of the "New Left" held far more relevance to many red diaper babies than the rigid ideology that defined their parents' radicalism. Few of them sought to join the party. "As a teenager, I certainly would have described myself as a communist, but I would never have thought of joining the party," says Meeropol. "It never really crossed my mind. Then, by the time I got to college, I had the feeling that there was something stuffy about it. The party was a conservative element on the left."

This caused some political tension between the generations. Baxandall recalls that her father was not impressed by the campaigning methods adopted by the New Left. "My father was so upset about the gulags, but he thought the New Left was wrong. He didn't like the agitprop. He didn't go on marches. He thought I was too critical of the Soviet Union."

For all the differences between them and their parents, one thing they did inherit was a honed awareness of the fragility of US democracy - an insight that informs their impressions of recent developments in the nation's political culture following September 11. "America is on a political course that is alarmingly similar to the McCarthy period," says Meeropol. "The prime motivating factor for the average American, according to what the media and the polls tell us, is fear. In the McCarthy period, we reacted to fear by believing that our way of life was going to be destroyed by the international communist conspiracy that was going to get us. Today, the entire Bush administration policy is founded on fear.

"If you were to go to the USA Patriot Act [an act approved by Congress and President Bush in October 2001, 'enhancing' domestic security and surveillance procedures] and plug in the word communist where the word 'terrorist' appears, you would have an act that looks very much like the McCarran Act." What's changed, says, Meeropol, is that whereas McCarthyism victimised people for what they believed, the current repression places them under scrutiny simply for who they are. "We can't point to an organised political entity that can be attacked in the same way that the Communist party could be attacked so we just round up people who are South Asian or Middle Eastern. The difference is that instead of attacking activists, people are being attacked because of their status. So a lot of people being detained today just happen to be the wrong religion or the wrong colour or the wrong nationality."

Baxandall believes that, while the threats to civil rights are analogous, the political landscape is different in ways that are both more and less promising. "We had a name for it back then. We called it McCarthyism. We had an analysis of it and a much more political voice. Now there's no organisation and no political voice, and that's a big problem. But back then, our numbers were so puny; now, it's not as left, but it's more mass. A lot of people feel that there's something wrong all over the United States. It's just that, so far, it hasn't come together."

If it does come together and the administration continues on its present path (two big, but not unlikely, ifs), Meeropol believes that history could well be on course to repeat itself: "This administration has put in place the mechanism to create a whole new generation of red diaper babies."